PaV

It seems like every other day there’s an article where scientists are discovering the presence of genes thought to have arisen late in evolution to be already present in ancient forms, so-called “living fossils”. In this case what we see in this particular “living fossil”, the shark, is the presence of genetic activity that is associated with ‘digit formation’ in limbed animals. Previously, scientists thought that there was some late phase additional activity which, we may say, was ‘added onto’ fin development. Here’s a quote: “We’ve uncovered a surprising degree of genetic complexity in place at an early point in the evolution of appendages,” said developmental biologist Martin Cohn, Ph.D.” As I say, these types of articles seem commonplace, yet Read More ›

I was just reading this fairly-well written article, and came upon one of the last paragraphs. It’s an interesting take by a, shall we say, “non-scientist”: “These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems. Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled – on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.” You have to like this logic: the scientific community doesn’t want to entertain the idea of ID with its implicit argument Read More ›

I always find it interesting how Darwinists explain things. Here is a gene that, according to the author, exists in no known species, and simply shows up in this particular fly genome. The way Darwinists want to explain things–knowing that NDE is essentially ‘dead in the water’–is by talking about duplicated genes which are allowed to mutate since their needed function is supplied by the original gene. Well, that can’t be the explanation here since we’re not dealing with a duplicated gene, or a pseudo-gene, or anything like that at all. So, it’s now transposons and viruses inserting this gene into the fly genome. While that’s, hypothetically possible, right now there’s no way of proving that since, per the author, Read More ›

The tagline for the article from PhysOrg.com that I link to here, was “Nano propellers pump with proper chemistry.” Despite no mention being made of it, my immediate thought was: “Their design is based on what biological systems already do.” Then, perusing the article, after all the talk about what Petr Král is doing in his Univ. of Illinois lab, about how this pump works, etc, etc., we find the following: Král’s laboratory studies how biological systems, like tiny flagella that move bacteria, offer clues for building motors, motile systems and other nanoscale devices in a hybrid environment that combines biological and inorganic chemistry. I find it almost infuriating that there are labs like Petr Kral’s all over the world Read More ›

I just wanted to bring this article in Science to the attention of this blog. The results are very intriguing–“these gene “inventions” along the lineage leading to animals were likely already well integrated with preexisting eukaryotic genes in the eumetazoan progenitor.” It seems that the very primitive looking sea anenome is a very sophisticated animal. [As an aside, though Darwinists will be quick to deny this—it’s very easy to deny anything (in fact, I deny that I’m writing this right now!)—this is completely contrary to what Charles Darwin himself expected; viz., that such complex regulatory functions developed in so short a period of time. Since it is soft-bodied, it doesn’t fossilze that well; but there is a well-preserved fossil in Read More ›

In this latest post at PhysOrg, it seems that Darwinism hasn’t helped, but instead hindered the fight against cancer.

Dr. Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at Berkeley,

proposed in 2000 that the assumption underlying most cancer research today is wrong. That assumption, that cancer results from a handful of genetic mutations that drive a cell into uncontrolled growth, has failed to explain many aspects of cancer, he said, and has led researchers down the wrong path.

And, in words that support Behe’s main thesis in “The Edge of Evolution”, Deusberg also adds:

“In this new study and in one published in 2005, we have proved that only chromosomal rearrangements, rather than mutations, can explain the high rates and wide ranges of drug resistance in cancer cells.”

Think of the number of people who die each year of cancer as compared to the number who die from bacterial infection, and one can easily see that all the chest-slapping by the Darwinists about how RM+NS has given us anti-bacterial drugs can know pound their breasts in remorse at the “wrong path” mutational theory has led cancer researchers. This isn’t just a battle between the God-denying and the God-affirming segments of our global society, it’s about good science versus bad science, about reason versus myth.

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Scientists have now found that the Hox genes necessary for tetrapod development is present in a primitive fish (a paddlefish). Here’s part of what they write: “Tetrapods have a second phase of Hox gene expression that happens later in development. During this second phase, hands and feet develop. Although this second phase is not known in zebrafish, the scientists found that it is present in paddlefish, which reveals that a pattern of gene activity long thought to be unique to vertebrates with hands and feet is in fact much more primitive. This is the first molecular support for the theory that the genes to help make fingers and toes have been around for a long time — well before the Read More ›

You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s what some Japanese scientists have done with bacteria. I think we’ve officially reached the “information age” of evolutionary biology.

Researchers have discovered that in certain competitive situations, the “fittest” phenotype is the one that is “rarest” for a given population. In a study of fruit flies, when “rovers” and “sitters” were foraging together, “rovers” did better if they were surrounded by “sitters”, and vice versa. As the author of the study put it: “If you’re a rover surrounded by many sitters, then the sitters are going to use up that patch and you’re going to do better by moving out into a new patch. So you’ll have an advantage because you’re not competing with the sitters who stay close to the initial resource. On the other hand, if you’re a sitter and you’re mostly with rovers, the rovers are Read More ›

In a new article in this week’s New Scientist magazine, the marsupial and placental genomes are compared. Only a meager 1.1% of the “coding” (coding for “genes”) portion of the placental genome is “unique”, while a whopping 20.5% of the “non-coding” (so-called ‘junk’ DNA) was unique to placental mammals. This indicates that where marsupials and placental mammals are genetically different is almost entirely to be found in the “junk DNA” sections of the genome. As one of the lead scientists remarks, “”Evolution is tinkering much more with the controls than with the genes themselves.” If the immense physiological differences separating the orders of marsupials and mammals is attributable almost entirely to the “control” of the genome, then, indeed, DNA not Read More ›

It appears scientists are now able to attach genes in particular spots on genechips using a new “daisy” molecule. This allows them to place genes onto the chip in a sequential–that is, ordered–fashion. The first purpose of this breakthrough is to produce certain proteins in an extra-cellular manner. But, as the quote below shows, they also have plans to put together a logical chain of these chips for “information processing”. Is that right? Do cells carry on “information processing”, just like this computer I’m working at? So, using an analogy to Sir Fred Hoyle’s quip about evolution, I suppose if a tornado passed through the components section of a Fry’s Electronics store, out would pop a computer. You have to Read More ›

In the latest issue of Nature, a team of researchers report that using RNA interference techniques to re-activate a tumor suppressor, p53, they were able to induce a “cellular senescence program that was associated with differentiation and the upregulation of inflammatory cytokines.”

The use of the word “program” highlights that proponents of NDE have an even sterner task at hand: explaining how the logical loop of a “program” can be built up using NDE mechanisms. There is a ring of “irreducibility” to the idea of a “program”, since each part of a “program” is indispensable and likewise an integral part of the program’s intended output. Genetics is looking everyday to be more and more like an exercise in computer programming–just as IDists have predicted. Behe and Snoke’s paper shows the huge improbability of placing two amino acids side-by-side via gene duplication and random mutation. Now NDE must do much more than that. When can we expect them to give up?

Here’s the link:

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It seems that every day there some new news item from science detailing how scientists in search of an optimal solution to their problem at hand, end up finding their solution in biological nature. This latest from PhysOrg.com shows how, in the nano-world, engineering solutions abound. Is it a marvel of natural selection?

Here you’ll find one instance of what I think, taken together, poses a challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy that it can’t meet.

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Here’s a portion of a letter sent by Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe to the CEO of ExxonMobil. To me, at least, it is becoming increasingly apparent that science as a discipline has lost that essential quality which made science’s authority seem impregnible: objectivity. We increasingly live in a world where everything, including science itself, has been politicized. We’re witnessing the Fall of the Scientific Empire. The parallels to the ID-NDE debate are transparently clear. Instead of “burning the witches”, we’ll soon be seeing the “heretics” (those that don’t believe in NDE or Global Warming) burnt at the stake. I truly believe we find ourselves at a watershed moment in history. Should science itself be unmoored from its “objective” Read More ›

Here’s an article just in from PhysOrg.com. What Professor Shepherd proposes should prove to be very enlightening. He used his algorithm on the book, Emma, by Jane Austen, and was able to break up 80% of the text–minus punctuation marks and inputted just as a string of letters–into words and sentences without any knowledge of grammar. Just think of what analogies can be drawn if they end up breaking up 80% of DNA into grammatical wholes! Here’s a quote: Professor Shepherd originally tested his computer programme on the entire text of Emma by Jane Austen after removing all the spaces and punctuation, leaving just a long impenetrable line of letters. Despite having no knowledge of the English vocabulary or syntax, Read More ›